Great effects, poor execution
Graphically, this game was above average. The parallaxing backgrounds were smooth, the ships looked very nice, the explosions were pretty cool, and the simple touches like water wakes when you flew low on the first level added eye candy.
However, my biggest gripe was the enemies. The point of a sidescrolling shooter is to wait for an opportunity to swoop in and blow your enemy out of the sky. With the way you had these bad guys shooting, those opportunities were hard to find. Basically, every enemy was on a short timer and shooting once that timer counted down to zero. Once ten or so enemies started showing up, it was hard to not take several hits if you wanted to try and shoot them down. Since your basic weapon could only fire straight ahead, the majority of the enemies were difficult to take down without taking a hit or two. I never got far enough to discover all these badass weapons that other people are mentioning because I closed the game in sheer frustration.